Fairy tales are great ways to unite various pieces of mental debris — such as Fundamentalist Mormons, muskrats, and (as it turns out) incorrect diagnoses of potentially debilitating diseases — without over-thinking anything. The following is intended for a collection of fairy tales about my time in Laramie.
the journey to health and wellbeing ... my story
Beaver and Muskrat Prepare for Winter
“The pituitary gland is located deep inside the brain,” explains Beaver.
“It’s true,” says Muskrat. “He’s a doctor.”
I’d like to say I sought out Beaver and Muskrat for advice, but I found them swimming together in a beam of light on the water and when they got to the shore they just started giving advice about my recent doctor’s visit. I was busy thinking about my kidneys taking a grand vacation. They lean against each other before the Great Pyramids. Right now, they could be sending golden eagles after wolves in Mongolia, or snuggled up in Germany, sipping mugs of warm beer.
“Does anyone in your family have diabetes?” asked the doctor — the real one, not the beaver.
“My great-grandma did. And my great-grandpa.”
“Anyone else?”
I thought and thought, because I sensed it was pretty important.
Afterward, I was walking along the Green Belt, by the canal, when I noticed the beam of light on the water — the stripe of light from the sun, and wondered if it could be a symptom of my rare and inoperable brain tumor, and not actually the sun, which I had taken for granted as the source of other brilliant flashes of light on water. I actually didn’t know it — the tumor — was inoperable. I only got so far in my Googling, which the doctor told me not to do. “I’m going to,” I had told her. So she told me what sites to go to. “I would stay off the computer, though,” she said. “It’s going to scare the shit out of you.” Or, “It’s going to scare you.” But it scared me more than that.
So, I was happy to see two small mammals swimming along in a stripe of light as if they were friends — particularly that one mammal was much smaller than the other. And at first, I was happy when Beaver and Muskrat waddled and scurried, respectively, up the bank and introduced themselves. Talking animals! What luck! Of course, in the back of my mind, I thought this of all things screamed “tumor,” but why spoil it for myself. But all they wanted to talk about was my mysterious illness.
I tried to get Beaver to stop talking about my pituitary gland. “Shouldn’t you be getting ready for winter?”
But Beaver moved on to the subject of my kidneys and their impending failure. Or maybe that was Muskrat’s area. And then it was on to the tumor talk. I don’t know—semi-aquatic mammals bore me just now. Maybe I’ll get back to them later.
I was told I quite possibly have this thing, this thing I shouldn’t look up, Monday afternoon. That night I looked it up.
Tuesday was busy. It was a blur. But no crying. I did tell my friend in a weird way that my kidneys weren’t working right (I didn’t mention possible causes, such as anything about a brain tumor; in truth, I find it difficult to believe in things like brain tumors), and asked if he could take me to the hospital if I called him out of the blue. He said he would. And then I said it really wasn’t that serious, and not to worry. The kidneys just weren’t filtering things right. That was all. But of course that could be very, very serious.
Wednesday it took a long time to get moving. I started watching a show about polygamist families. One family lived in a big triplex built by a Fundamentalist Mormon architect, each wife with her own section, and the husband would come home from work and move through each part of the house and kiss each wife and say hi to each group of kids and help with the dishes or talk with a daughter about her plans to join the naval academy. One wife said something like, “We’re separate but work as a unit.” If only my organs were like the wives. But who would the husband be — the thing that unites them all, assuming he is that thing? My brain. But that doesn’t seem right. What if the wives just don’t want to live together anymore?
Finally, I had to stop watching TV. I did work for several hours at a coffee shop, although on many occasions I had to stop thinking about my kidneys and if one if them maybe hurt, and if I was going to die only a month before I was supposed to move back in with my boyfriend in Montana. But then I’d move my eyes over a line of words enough times to focus again and I’d work for awhile.
Wednesday night, I said, fuck it. I drank a beer, just the one, and watched the polygamist show. It was a whole series. On the phone, my boyfriend was worried. So I made jokes about calling my kidneys my kitties. “I’ll go to the doctor and say, ‘My kitties ain’t purring like they should.’”
I think about parties I can throw for my kidneys to boost morale. Kidney beans set out in bright glass bowls. That’s all I can think of. No kidney piñatas. Maybe for strength I’ll eat the kidney of some animal, if that’s possible, if kidneys can be prepared for human consumption, if all the protein won’t damage my own kidneys.
It’s still Wednesday night now. I just have to sit here and ignore my kidneys. It snowed last night, and I’m grateful all the dead grass and leafless trees are hidden. When I’m scared, I think, at least one person in town knows about my kidneys, and will take me to the hospital if I need him to. I wish I could tell him how much it helps to know he’s right across the bridge from me. But what if all this is nothing.
***
Tonight, my kidneys will leave my body. They will go on journeys of their own. Here’s how it happens. They wobble through the snow, leaving depressions that fill with the blood running off of them. They are going away for the winter. They are going to live with Beaver and Muskrat. Don’t they know I can’t live without them? But it’s their 27th year anniversary in February. And they no longer need that body with its toxins leaking out over the bed, its plans for bowls of beans.
***
“Let me tell you about specific gravity in urine,” the doctor had said, and I wanted to laugh at the outer-space-sounding term applied to the quarter-cup of pee I produced. “Kidneys can concentrate urine to 1.030. Okay?” She waited while I wrote it down in my notepad under the heading, “Specific Gravity.” “And they can dilute it to 1.005. Okay? Your urine is diluted below that. It’s less than 1.005.”
Did I even have human kidneys? Was she saying my kidneys were super-kidneys? How can something be doing something outside the realm of what it could actually ever possibly do?
“So is this hurting my kidneys? Are my kidneys damaged?”
I remember her face. I remember the book she got out — “they just make the letters so darn big, don’t they?” I remember her smile. There will be testing. Before the testing, just do what you normally do. Did she mean I could drink coffee and beer and eat meat? I didn’t ask. These things didn’t occur to me at the time. But what did she say about the kidneys? All there is in my notebook are specific gravity numbers, diabetes insipidus, and the name of the one website she said I could go to because all the others would scare the shit out of me.
Well, if they, my own two kidneys, which I have loved and protected all this time, as best I could, decide to take off through the snow tonight, there’s nothing I can do to stop them.
